ABSTRACT
In most modern scholarship, provincial labels (Macedonian, Paphlagonian, Cappadocian, etc.) are seen to have functioned as ethnicities in Byzantium. However, this chapter proposes that they were not ethnicities, but regional identities fully imbricated within the Roman rubric; they were basically regional variations, materialized by stereotypes, of the ethnic Roman norm. They drew their force from antiquarian associations, military units, and the ancient (and Byzantine) habit of referring to the population of a province by their ethnika, even if the ethnonym in question had no relation to an ethnicity at all (e.g., the genos of Opsikion, Boukelarios, etc). This chapter strives to clear up a great deal of confusion among historians who are taken in by these labels and assume that Byzantium was a multi-ethnic ethnic empire because it consisted of Macedonians, Paphlagonians, Cappadocians, and the like.
